The Anatomy of Melancholy

Eat, play, drink: after death there is no pleasure.

Human beings and beasts share the same condition: as one dies, so does the other, Ecclesiastes 3:19. The world goes round:

—— day is driven out by day, And new moons keep passing away:

In former times they ate and drank, married and buried, bought and sold, planted and built, and they will go on doing so.

Our life is short and wearisome; there is no remedy when a person dies, and no one has been known to return from the grave. We are born by chance, and afterwards shall be as though we had never existed; the breath in our nostrils is like smoke, and so on, and the spirit vanishes like thin air.

Come, let us enjoy the pleasures before us; let us eagerly use created things as in our youth, fill ourselves with costly wine and perfumes, let the flower of life not pass us by, and crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither, and so on.

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and so on. Come, let us take our fill of love and find pleasure in embraces, for this is our portion, this is our lot.

Time slips away, and we grow old as the years pass silently.

As for the rest, heaven and hell, let children and superstitious fools believe it. These people are so far from trembling at the dreadful day of judgment that they wish with Nero, let it happen while I am alive—let it come in their own time. They are so complacent, so reckless, so excessive in lust and pleasure, so ready for revenge,

that, as Velleius Paterculus said of certain villains in Rome in his time, what they wickedly dared, they resolutely carried out. Whatever they undertake will be carried out with as much recklessness as the attempt was wicked.

Were it not for God’s restraining grace, fear and shame, earthly punishment and their own disgrace, they would disembowel one another like Lycaon, devour one another like cannibals, or destroy one another like Cadmus’s soldiers.

These are utterly impious and commonly avowed atheists, who use God’s name only to swear by it. Their behaviour expresses nothing but sensual indulgence or hypocrisy. Like Pentheus, they neglect and scorn the gods’ rites and religious ceremonies; they would be gods themselves, or at least companions of the gods:

Caesar shares dominion with Jove.

Apries, an Egyptian tyrant, rose, says Herodotus, to such a height of pride, arrogance and impiety, such contempt for God and humanity, that he thought his kingdom so secure that no god or human being could wrest it from him—neither God nor men could take it from him.

A certain blasphemous king of Spain, as Lansius reports, issued an edict forbidding any of his subjects for ten years to believe in, invoke or worship any god.